Having Too Little In Life, Being The Underdog, Is Only Good As Backstory, Not The Constant Every Day

“Having too little in life, being the underdog, is only good as backstory, not the constant every day of your breathing.”

-No One is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts

“While speaking up against...explicitly racist actions is critical, we must also be careful not to use them to keep ourselves on the ‘good’ side of a false binary. I have found it much more useful to think of myself as on a continuum. Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime. But I can continually seek to move further along it. I am not at a fixed position on the continuum; my position is dictated by what I am doing at a given time. Conceptualizing myself on an active continuum changes the question from whether I am or am not racist to a much more constructive question: Am I actively seeking to interrupt racism in this context?”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“Whites hold the social and institutional positions in society to infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not. A person of color may refuse to wait on me if I enter a shop, but people of color cannot pass legislation that prohibits me and everyone like me from buying a home in a certain neighborhood.”

-White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his.”

- Educated by Tara Westover

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

-Educated by Tara Westover

“He’d tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he’d innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He’s found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn’t really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.”

-Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman